According to reports, Scottish football will finally vote on these ridiculous colt team proposals in April. One newspaper says we’re willing to spend well in excess of £1 million to make this happen.
As if we have money to burn and nothing to spend it on.
I am dead set against the idea of our colt team playing lower league football in Scotland. Dead set against it. I don’t think it has any real merit. I don’t think our players will improve playing blood and thunder football.
It will skew all of our development operations in the wrong direction.
What’s the point in emphasising skills in an environment like that?
But let me say what’s perfectly obvious; the current system does not work at all. Because the current system is no system at all.
No wonder so many of our youth players have left the club of late; they don’t play enough football and know this is a major barrier to cracking the first team. If the colt’s proposal fails – and there is virtually no chance that it will succeed, in spite of ourselves and the Ibrox club planning to try and bribe clubs into accepting it – then we need a Plan B.
It scares you to think that this nonsense is Plan A … nevertheless, we do need to have something in the pipeline if it fails. We plainly cannot go on as we are. Whatever happened to all those youth tournaments we used to play?
Whatever happened to the development plans which saw us produce great technical footballers like McGregor, Forrest and Tierney?
You know when youth football in Scotland started to collapse?
When the Ibrox club asked to leave the Under 21 and Under 18 leagues, and the SFA granted them permission to.
Other clubs soon followed suit. That was when things started to go downhill … once again, something Ibrox wanted to do was approved in spite of the obvious risks.
The cost of that has been rising ever since.
We are one of the worst impacted clubs.
Look how many top young players have decided to leave us in the last year alone?
We spend more money on youth development than just about every other club combined … and it does us no good because decisions taken elsewhere have hampered us at each step.
I hope we have something up our sleeves just in case this latest plan fails.
As bad as it would be, it’s at least an attempt to address a major issue … even if it’s a dreadful option.
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